A few days ago, I wrote about the coming crisis of retirement that could last for decades. Here's another example:

And even as its pension fund faces this giant bulge in payouts, G.M. is not putting any new money in — the company is not required to make any contributions to the fund until 2013.

The longer this goes on, the weaker the fund will be and the more uncertain its long-term viability.

For now, the pension payments to its younger “retirees,” part of a deal G.M. negotiated with the United Automobile Workers union in 2007, allow the company to drastically shrink its work force without having to come up with the cash to pay severance. The payments also relieve some of the burden on social service programs in the countless factory towns and counties around the country with large numbers of G.M.’s newly jobless.

   And...

In the short term, G.M.’s newly minted retirees, those in their 40s and 50s, have the most to lose if the plan is rapidly depleted and fails. But over time, the risk will shift to the government and the dwindling number of active U.A.W. workers still building cars at G.M. For those workers, a secure pension is already becoming an increasingly distant dream.

“They could find that they don’t get their full pensions when they retire, because the plan has had to be terminated because of the payments to current retirees,” Mr. Elliott said. “There are definitely these intergenerational transfer issues with underfunded pensions.”

   And, this article does dispell the notion that UAW retirees are living it up in retirement:

   I can't help but laugh at the transparent crap passed around by the protectors of the financial kingdom. In a column in today's Wall Street Journal, Roger Altman writes under the headline, "We'll Need To Raise Taxes Soon". Altman's tagline for his bio reads: "founder and chairman of Evercore Partners, was deputy secretary of the Treasury in the first Clinton administration." It really doesn't describe him fully--this is a guy who started his career at Lehman Brothers in the 1970s and, until his "selfless" service to the nation in the Clinton years, was a vice-chairman of The Blackstone Group, and "head of its merger and acquisition advisory business and a member of its investment committee", with "primary responsibility for Blackstone's international business". If you want a profile of a guy with the hand on the tiller of the disastrous financial system that has impoverished millions, Altman is your guy.

   So, what's the upshot of the future of tax hikes?:

Today, the U.S. ranks next to last among the 28 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations in total federal revenue as a share of GDP. Our federal revenues represent 18% of national output, down from 20% just 10 years ago. That makes the mismatch between our spending and our revenue very large, producing the huge deficits we face.

We all know the recent and bitter history of tax struggles in Washington, let alone Mr. Obama's pledge to exempt those earning less than $250,000 from higher income taxes. This suggests that, possibly next year, Congress will seriously consider a value-added tax (VAT). A bipartisan deficit reduction commission, structured like the one on Social Security headed by Alan Greenspan in 1982, may be necessary to create sufficient support for a VAT or other new taxes.

This challenge may be the toughest one Mr. Obama faces in his first term. Fortunately, the new president is enormously gifted. That's important, because it is no longer a matter of whether tax revenues must increase, but how.

   Altman is now the most recent stalking horse for the VAT--a regressive tax. It is fascinating to read how someone can write an entire column about the decline of tax revenues and entirely ignore the reason: a raid on the country's treasury by people like him, the richest one person who have plundered our resources to the tune of trillions of dollars. Why does the U.S. ranks next-to-last among 28 OCED nations? Mainly because in most of those nations, it is an accepted fact that the richest one person pay a larger percentage of their income back as dues to run a decent society.

   So, we now are told: taxes are going up. We, the bankers and the other genuises who have entirely failed in managing the economy, are going to sock middle-income people with a regressive tax--but never address the real crime: how the wealthiest one percent have ripped off the country.

   Last week, I wrote about the energy bill and passages that impose penalties on countries that violate the bill. The president thinks this is "protectionism":

“At a time when the economy worldwide is still deep in recession and we’ve seen a significant drop in global trade,” Mr. Obama said, “I think we have to be very careful about sending any protectionist signals out there.”

He added, “I think there may be other ways of doing it than with a tariff approach.”

   Respectfully, Mr. President, you don't do the debate over trade any good by lapsing back on lazy marketing phrases like "protectionism". Can we just simply talk about the RULES. You may not like the rules but let's deal with that notion--rather than toss around intellectually soft hot-button phrases that shed more heat than light. Indeed, it would be hard to make the argument that the rules the energy bill has would have more than a pinprick on trade levels given that the decline in trade is about the collapse of consumer demand which directly results from depressed wages.

   Trade and climate change are closely connected issues. Think just about the carbon emissions of planes and ships traversing the globe carrying stuff that we consume. I'll come back to that in a sec.

   Yesterday, Rep. Mike Michaud of Maine introduced the House version of the TRADE Act; the Senate's sponsor is Sherrod Brown. Eyes On Trade reports:

This year's version of the legislation is backed by 106 original cosponsors, including nine committee chairs and 45 subcommittee chairs. The cosponsors come from the full range of Democratic caucuses and from around the country. The full list of cosponsors is available here. The Trade Act - 2009 version - has double the number of original cosponsors as the Trade Act introduced last June, showing that support is rapidly growing for a fair-trade alternative to our current failed NAFTA-WTO model.

   What the bill means is nicely summed up by Lori Wallach, Director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch Division:

The premise of the TRADE Act is that America's trade agenda must be brought into conformity with America's domestic agenda of good jobs, a clean environment, safe food, quality and affordable medicines, and essential services. By removing provisions that limit imported food and product safety and financial service regulation, provide foreign investors with rights to attack domestic environmental and health laws, and incentivize the offshoring of jobs to low-wage countries - and adding effective labor, environmental, health and safety standards to provide the floor of decency necessary to ensuring trade agreements benefit more people - the road map provided by the TRADE Act would lead to trade agreements that could enjoy broad public support.

   At the same time, there is some question about whether the current energy bill does enough to deal with global warming and whether the president has given up too much just to get a bill passed, per The Financial Times:

Others argue that the dozens of compromises Democratic leaders have struck with their colleagues from the rural and manufacturing belts have made a hash of the bill's framework.

"In order to get the votes, the bill's managers have taken off most of its environmental edge," said Rob Shapiro, chairman of the US climate change taskforce, which backs a carbon tax. "If we were to pass a toothless bill like this, we would probably have to wait five or 10 years for another chance to do it right."

For example, in contrast to Mr Obama's campaign promise that 100 per cent of the permits would be auctioned off, the bill gives away 85 per cent for free and only moves to a full auction in 2030.

   So, back to the trade-climate change link. The story that caught my eye this morning was in The Wall Street Journal:

I have argued that the current crisis we are in now is the product of at least three decades of a bankrupt economic system. Now, looking forward, the same system has set the stages, according to a report just out, for a massive worldwide crisis in retirement security that will last decades. The reason we face this crisis is because of the foolishness of the "free market" ideology and the greed of the wealthiest people in society.

   Yesterday, I was back doing the hard stuff...not in the drinking area (though, actually, I did have a bit of Glenlivet later in the day). No, the hard stuff is trying to have an intelligent conversation with anyone associated with the so-called "free trade" wing of the world. In this case, I was asked to debate former Bush Commerce Secretary Carlos Guiterrez on the issues of trade.

   Now, I had very little memory about Guiterrez, having not paid much attention to his public persona. But, you have to figure: a businessman, a former high-level government official...you'll get some good back-and-forth. Instead, Guiterrez turns out to be a total empty suit (okay, maybe I was naive going in) whose sole response seemed to consistent of "you're a liberal. Check this out:

   If this guy just wants to throw around the liberal "insult", be my guest--it seems so out-dated and almost bizarre. And, as I pointed out at the end, it's bizarre coming from a guy who was a key part of an Administration that was thoroughly discredited by its performance--seems to me the voters made that quite clear in 2008.

Check out this video about HAARM Healthy Americans Against Reforming Medicine, featuring stars like Glenn Beck, Rick Scott and Zach Wamp. The video is the love child of SEIU and Living Liberally. I wrote this one, so I like to think of myself as the DNA. Or RNA.

The other day, I saw an amazing spectacle: a firefighter responded to a call to a burning building in New York City and, as he was dragging the fire hose to the fire, a crowd of angry people stopped him and said, "Stop. Your pension is too generous so don't you dare put that fire out". Absurd, you say? Well, yes--if you mean the intensifying attacks against the pensions people earn.

   i've never liked the nonsense about the importance of the political "center". As I see it, that has basically been a cop-out--a fear of confronting the people who want to continue to rip-off the workers of the country by promoting the notion that the "center" requires that taxes be low (meaning, taxes on the very wealthy) and that we don't mess with the so-called "free market", no matter how disastrous that ideology has been.

   Which is essentially what Paul Krugman says today on the subject of whether we will get health care reform:

The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993.

   And...

The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by “centrist” Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around “centrist,” by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.

What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.

   And...

But this fantasy can’t be allowed to stand in the way of giving America the health care reform it needs. This time, the alleged center must not hold. [emphasis added]

   To be clear, I am a firm believer in single-payer health care. I don't care for the public option existing along side the continued insurance industry thieves. But, the point Krugman makes is accurate--we are being held hostage to the "center" when the "center" has no real standing among the people.

   We need to carve the rotting "center" out of the political calculus so we can return to debates about what makes sense in the real world, not in the world of political maneuvering, back-room deals and Albany-style politics that is never really about the people.